On Ownership...

Every year, my wife and I make a plan for our kids to take on more responsibility. This includes things like going to the school by themselves, taking care of brushing their teeth, cleaning up their rooms, etc.

Taking on more responsibility ultimately means taking ownership for certain topics. But they can only take ownership if my wife and I choose to let go of ownership/control ourselves.

If we constantly tell the kids what to wear, when to brush their teeth, when to leave the house to make it to school on time, and how to clean their rooms, we interfere with the process of them taking ownership.

This is something that is particularly difficult for my wife... after all she is the mother and instinctively she is more worried than I am.

My thinking goes always "what is the worst thing that can happen?" And if the worst thing is that our kids are late to school or that they forget to take a jacket, then I am not really concerned.

I want them to face the conflict with their teacher or feel cold on their way back home... because this is a lesson they will remember much more than any argument from my side. That lesson will result in them taking more ownership.

This brings me to the work I do with organizations...

Most of these organizations and by that I mean managament within organizations acts like my wife and tries to define everything for everyone.

Doing that results in a ton of bureaucracy and overhead... and it definitely becomes the biggest barrier to people truly taking ownership.

There are great examples of bureaucracy going too far e.g. providing your employees with a document that details on ten pages the dress code they should adhere to.

Of course this won't result in an entrepreneurial culture in which people take ownership and make decisions.

If we want people to take ownership - and ownership can only be taken, it can't be given - we need to let go of control. We, as senior leaders, need to be OK with things being done in a different way than we would do them. There simply is no other way.

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove once said:

"The person either can't do it or won't do it; he is either not capable or not motivated."

In order to take ownership a person needs to be both capable and motivated. And these two things are exactly what leadership is responsible for. Make sure people are capable to take decisions and make sure people are motivated to take decisions.

Taking decisions is taking ownership.

The capability piece includes two things:

1. Context... knowing which goals we want to achieve
2. Competence... knowing how to achieve these goals

The motivation piece also includes two things:

1. Courage... feeling safe enough to take a decision amidst uncertainty
2. Commitment... wanting to achieve results and thus actually taking decisions

The question I ask myself on a day-to-day basis is how do I develop these four aspects in my kids, my employees, and others around me. How much time do I make for this and to what extent do I just expect them to be capable and motivated.

I am not saying that as leaders (parents included) we should lower our standards but we also not to accept that certain things need to be developed. That includes the skills i.e. competence, but also a lot of the motivational aspects of ownership.

People (and kids are people) need to learn the WHY so that they develop more and more intrinsic motivation of doing things. Transporting that WHY is our job.

So the discussion I have with my wife is that instead of telling the kids what to do and controlling them, we should rather lead with context and not control.

This is a fantastic concept I learned while researching about Netflix...

And yes, us letting go and sharing the context resulted in our kids taking on more responsibility and ultimately taking full ownership of more and more aspects of their day to day life.

Great side benefit: My wife and I have freed up more of our brain capacity for other things. The moment you are not worrying about your kid's jacket, you can spend your mental energy on more valuable things. The same applies to leaders in organizations.

The benefits are clear... what about the downsides?

Do my kids get things right every time? No, of course not. But we - as adults - don't get things right either. Taking ownership means also making mistakes, owning those, and then hopefully learning from them.

This is the last element I try to help my kids with which is developing learning loops:

1. Systematically reflecting on things that did not turn out the way you wanted them to be.
2. Evaluating the decisions you took and what other options would have been possible.
3. Making a plan on what to do differently the next time you are in a similar situation.

Teaching people how to learn from mistakes is probably the most important thing I get to teach and also the most important thing I get to practice myself.

It is never easy to admit one's own mistakes... but it gets easier the more often one does that.

#FromNothingComesNothing